April 15th, 2020

Here is something you probably do not know about me.  I love little boxes.  Things to put things in.  And apparently I always have. I remember my Mother telling me a very long time ago that, even as a very small child, I would save little boxes and put things in them and then squirrel the boxes away in my bureau drawers.

I actually do remember using little jewelry boxes to keep small Barbie things in.  All of the tiny Barbie shoes would be in one box, the gloves in another, hats in yet another......sort of like that.  And until my sister and I received official Barbie Carry Cases one year (woohoo!) all of those small boxes of small things were stored in shoeboxes under my bed. Yet more boxes. It was an exciting day my friends. 

Most of my small boxes now arrive as gifts, usually with something inside.  I cannot promise you that I still have everything that originally was in any of these boxes. But the boxes, clearly I have kept.  I guess it's sort of the way little kids play with the cardboard boxes that their expensive presents come in.  Hah!  I just realized that.

Some of these I keep tucked away safely in various drawers, but other boxes are strewn about, here and there throughout the house.    And not all of them are  small.  Other, slightly larger boxes are here and there.  For example there is the old cigar box that holds my bookmarks.  And the pretty little purple box that has my camera chargers safely within.   I have glass jars that hold paper stars, sea glass and fishing floats.  

I will freely admit that I don't honestly know where all of these glass jars came from.  If I bought them (and I cannot imagine that I did) they must have come from yard sales because I'm way too cheap to spend big money on something like that.  My best guess is that my mother bought them in her yard-sale phase.  For a time she was wildly passionate about Yard Sales but almost everything she bought she ended up giving to either my sister or me. None of those yard sale scores were things we had ever asked for or even hinted we were thinking about.  She just mystically divined that whatever the object was, was something that we desperately needed to have.  And apparently, some of it, I did because I still have it. 

The jars of sea glass sit on my coffee table in the living room. Many people ask where it all came from.  Before you ask, it has been slowly accumulated throughout my life.  Most of it from the coast of Maine but not all.   The shells are primarily from  quite a variety of beaches over the many years of my life. The paper stars were a gift but I truly could not begin to tell you where the fishing floats started in their lives.  Just at some point, they began to live at my house. Not sure how that happened.  Again, probably from my mom,  but I like them and I've had them for a very long time.

Larger containers, be they glass, cardboard, metal or wooden, take up serious space.  I used to have a lot more.  But now we live in a smallish house so logically I have gotten rid of most of them, only keeping the ones I could not bear to part with.

Actually, as hard as it is to believe, I have a lot fewer small boxes too.   But I justify their existence in my life by pointing out that they don't take up a lot of room . And it's not as if they are useless afterall. I do have things in them.  Small things.  Things that are important to me but, because they are small, are easily lost.  Things like:

And then there is the box my mother gave me.  It is nothing at all that I would ever have bought for myself but I love it because she gave it to me.  I keep my engagement ring in there.  I wear my wedding ring nearly all of the time. (In fact, I only take it off if I start getting that eczema issue underneath the band again).   But the engagement ring I only wear if I'm dressied up.  For several reasons.  First I'm terrified of losing it .  Sometimes it fits perfectly, other times it's a little loose.  Once, while gesturing as I talked, (which I always so) the ring flew off my hand and zinged across a large room at work.  Everyone froze as I chased it, crawling around on my hands and knees under desks and chairs before finally finding it again.  Scary!  But I am also reluctant to wear it all of the time because I get dirty.  I bake, I clean, I dig in the dirt and cut down trees.  I am too lazy to constantly be cleaning that thing but it's too beautiful to not be kept clean so the easiest solution is to only wear it now and again.  If Tim minds, he has always been too kind to say so

So you see, these aren't just pretty things to collect,  they serve a purpose.  And not just the purpose of pleasing me.  Every single box I have holds something precious and important to me.  Well except one.  I do have one box that is still empty.  But it's new.  I'm sure in time I will find a purpose for it